Seattle really isn't as Emerald as it used to be.... (Mercer Island: real estate, apartment complex)

[flyingsaucermom]

[url=http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024305935_treecanopyxml.html]A fight for urban trees: Seattle’s wealthier neighborhoods leafier | Local News | The Seattle Times[/url]

This is in response to a previous thread about how "green" Seattle really is. Apparently, it's considerably less green than it was in the 1970's. Really unfortunate and I hope it's a trend that can be reversed soon and entirely.

[sean98125]

But the urbanist planners want fewer trees, not more. As we infill the city and make it denser we'll be trading our tree cover for mixed use apartment buildings and six townhouses on a 7200 square foot lot instead of a house and yard. You can't have trees and density in the same place.

[Ira500]

Originally Posted by sean98125

But the urbanist planners want fewer trees, not more. As we infill the city and make it denser we'll be trading our tree cover for mixed use apartment buildings and six townhouses on a 7200 square foot lot instead of a house and yard. You can't have trees and density in the same place.

Ding! Ding! Ding! What's the old saying? White man speak with forked tongue? They're talking about the value of density, how great it is when everything is walkable, but also how we need more trees.
If it were up to me, the mixed use apartment buildings and townhomes would be torn down, and replaced with community gardens and trees. Helluva real estate agent I am.

[strad]

Originally Posted by sean98125

But the urbanist planners want fewer trees, not more. As we infill the city and make it denser we'll be trading our tree cover for mixed use apartment buildings and six townhouses on a 7200 square foot lot instead of a house and yard. You can't have trees and density in the same place.

This is not true. You can have more trees with more density. Seattle will continue to add people whether you like it or not, so you either build one single family home per family, which requires knocking down a lot of trees for each home, or you stack multiple families on top of each other in more dense high rises and use LESS land. Of course the city needs to enforce green areas in between and mixed in with all that density, and encourage creation of more parks, but the idea that less dense housing means more trees is pretty silly. It just means you are spreading the destruction over a MUCH larger area.

[flyingsaucermom]

Originally Posted by sean98125

But the urbanist planners want fewer trees, not more. As we infill the city and make it denser we'll be trading our tree cover for mixed use apartment buildings and six townhouses on a 7200 square foot lot instead of a house and yard. You can't have trees and density in the same place.

Then they aren't very creative urban planners. Mercer Island managed to put gardens on the interstate. Seattle made it's convention center to be one of greenest (as in plants) I've seen. In the Issaquah Highlands we have a new apartment complex that put garden boxes on the roof. We also have new townhomes with rooftop patios, which as long as it has water, could enable a very hearty container garden. The idea with density and walkability is that in the overall picture there is less concrete and roadways being constructed, so that more natural environments are preserved.

[Transmition]

They should build high rise buildings in the place where tall trees once stood, which mysteriously died or were cut down and gave views of the sound to the house behind them.

[sean98125]

Look at an aerial picture of the Convention Center and tell me again how green it is. There is a thin line of trees around the outside seating areas, but there is nothing on the hundreds of thousands of square feet of blank, empty roof. A few trees that screen the bulk of the building from street level doesn't mean that a place has tree cover.

Ideally you limit the amount of space in a lot that a building can occupy to preserve green space, but in reality developers insist that they need to use every inch of a potential building envelope to make their project financially viable.

You can use Google Earth to view historical satellite imagery of Seattle neighborhoods. Take a look at Ballard, comparing the last 15 or 20 years as it became denser and as it was filled in. Look at the University District.

There is no money in the city budget to create new park land and even with the new park's taxing district there just isn't any empty space left to buy. You'd either have to buy land on the open market or condemn existing properties and tear them down to create new parks in the city.

I fully understand that we need more density in the city, and that we need to maximize the number of people living in it. But you can't maximize density without maximizing the amount of land in the city that is being used for housing, and the denser the population gets the more expensive it will be to convert land from residential and commercial uses to parks.

We need to be realistic. A dense urban environment is never going to have the tree cover of a community with more detached residences with yards around them. Compare Ballard to Wedgewood or Lake Forest Park in aerial photos. We just need to accept it and realize that it's a trade off we have to make.

[GatsbyGatz]

The city is surrounded by trees and suburbs covered in trees. Who cares if Seattle isn't a wild forest itself? Let's focus on curbing sprawl within the city limits and place our population within the city so that we can PRESERVE the trees outside of city limits.

[HotandHumid]

If Seattle wants to save it's green space and restore what's been lost, then City of Seattle officials need to pass ordinances requiring that before new office buildings, apartment buildings, etc., are built, there has to be set-backs of the buildings from the street that allow for the planting of trees and other forms of green landscaping in front of the buildings.
Set-backs not only allow for sunlight to enter the fronts of buildings and help keep down electrical lighting and heating costs, they also keep Seattle urban streets from turning into canyons of buildings more than they already have, plus they provide space for outdoor cafe's that building developers can rent out.

[GatsbyGatz]

Originally Posted by HotandHumid

If Seattle wants to save it's green space and restore what's been lost, then City of Seattle officials need to pass ordinances requiring that before new office buildings, apartment buildings, etc., are built, there has to be set-backs of the buildings from the street that allow for the planting of trees and other forms of green landscaping in front of the buildings.
Set-backs not only allow for sunlight to enter the fronts of buildings and help keep down electrical lighting and heating costs, they also keep Seattle urban streets from turning into canyons of buildings more than they already have, plus they provide space for outdoor cafe's that building developers can rent out.

That's a terrible idea. What are you, anti-growth?

Requiring setbacks would reduce land supply for offices/retail/residential thereby raising the cost of living. Reducing land supply and increasing land prices would result in reducing the interest in developing Seattle for investors, thereby harming Seattle's overall economy in the long-run.